the president of "eve babitz is a saint and joan didion is a c***" fan club

i have a bone to pick with lili anolik

At the end of literary playlist part II, I mentioned I had a bone to pick with Lili Anolik. This bone isn’t necessarily personal—I’m sure she’s perfectly tolerable over a martini. But like a shift in barometric pressure, barely perceptible yet migraine-inducing, she sets out to tell a story about Eve Babitz. The real Eve Babitz. The snubbed Eve Babitz. The shadow-of-Joan-Didion Eve Babitz. But to seduce the reader into caring, she must first dangle Didion like bait to reel you in.

Anolik writes as if she’s the only one who’s read Play It As It Lays and Eve’s Hollywood more than once. This would be fine if she didn’t spend the entire book swanning around in Babitz’s silk robe and blowing smoke in Didion’s face. She calls Eve a “buxom Zelig,” and yet assumes the same role herself by desperately elbowing into the frame. There’s a palpable strain to manufacture a rivalry, to pit restraint against eroticism. It’s not enough to canonize Eve, she must shiv Joan in the ribs while doing it. And for what? A myth that flatters Anolik’s own proximity to the spotlight, likely.

And yes, I read the whole thing. Every meandering, wine-sloshed, name-dropping page. I gave her my time because I am a Didion-disciple. A worshipper of neuroses rendered poetic. The targeted consumer sans tote bag. And now, regrettably, that time is non-refundable. But I will give her this: Anolik knows how to sell a book. She understood that Eve, brilliant as she was, wouldn’t sell as many units on her own. That’s why Joan comes first. Didion is the marquee name. The teeth in the trap. The reason your best friend’s cousin picked her up at The Strand. Joan is the lure and Eve is the line. Joan, the virgin. Eve, the vice.

It’s an old trick—shine up one woman by dulling the other. Anolik’s Babitz is the Patron Saint of Female Chaos: a Dionysian muse who doesn’t just kiss death on the mouth but fucks it repeatedly. But Joan? She’s the wet blanket at the orgy. Cold, removed, stiff. A skeleton with a typewriter exorcising avoidance. The dichotomy isn’t just lazy, it’s insulting and egregious. It mistakes polarity for depth and reduction for insight. It compresses both women in service of an idle binary: fun versus frigid, life force versus lifelessness.

Somewhere around page 190, Anolik admits that the infamous letter—Eve’s visceral jab at Didion’s size (“Could you write what you write if you weren’t so tiny, Joan?”)—was never actually sent. It’s the book’s summit—a ghost peak, an emotional Ponzi scheme. You ascend through anecdote and insinuation, scandal and half-truth, only to find the climax is actually a mirage. The moment meant to validate the entire Babitz-versus-Didion construct dissolves into some social sleight of hand. If the letter was never sent, then the feud is entirely subjective. And if the feud is subjective, what is Hollywood’s Eve but a questionable ruse? The whole thing becomes a hall of mirrors—Eve as Eve, Joan as Not-Eve, and Anolik’s reflection bouncing desperately between the two. What we’re left with isn’t history, it’s cosplay. Both women flattened, once again—reduced to opposing forces—retrofitted for the “cult classic” crowd.

What Anolik wants, I think, is entry. She wants to be an asterisk in Eve’s margins, an epitaph in Joan’s lore. But unlike Babitz, who mythologized herself with the careless genius of someone already drunk on her own myth, or Didion, who wrote like she was cross-examining herself in court, Anolik comes off needy. Desperate, even. She’s not in control of the narrative—she’s thrashing in it. Grasping at glamour by association. I won’t argue that Eve didn’t deserve the spotlight. She was a genius of indulgence. A philosopher of the pleasure principle. A woman who wrote like a martini tastes—sharp, cold, and a little dirty. But no amount of revision can change this simple fact: Babitz may have been the sunbaked secret of Los Angeles, but Didion will always be its obituary.

To pit Babitz against Didion is to misunderstand the terrain they both molded. What disappoints me is that Anolik couldn’t hold them both in her frame. She had to make one bleed to make the other shimmer. A tired move.

If you’re curious, the book is all heat and no light. It crackles but never burns. It wants to feel dangerous, like a gossip column written on Chateau Marmont stationery, but it’s really just a girl smoking at a table both women left years ago. Which is fine, not every book is a success. But if you’re going to light a cigarette in Eve Babitz’s name, maybe don’t use Joan Didion as the filter.